Sunday, January 14, 2018

Think Galactic- Iraq +100

For the December meeting of Think
Galactic, we discussed Iraq+100, edited by Hassan Blasim.

The aim of this project was to get
Iraqi writers—not necessarily science fiction writers—to set
stories 100 years after the American invasion. The result is an
interesting spread of stories.

As usual with our anthology
discussions, we focused our conversation on a few pre-selected
stories. At this meeting, we also picked our next 6 books for 2018.
Brief notes and possible spoilers below:

"Kahraman" by Anoud: we found this kind of
frightening, because it's so much like today, which is ks kind of
nihilistic. We also talked about the media/colonial problem of
needing “perfect victims” (needing our victims TO be perfect to
be convincing), and talked about real-life examples like Cyntoia
Brown and Sharbat Gula.

We were a little thrown by just HOW
Western-facing this is; we got very little feel of the cities and
cultures that the stories are set in.

We also had the general comment that
most of these stories were less science-fictional than we might have
wanted; however, the better stories had some fantastic, surrealistic,
or magical-realist kind of effects.

We compared this to Octavia's Brood,
another purposefully-collected anthology with pieces by non-sf
writers (which we discussed a while back), noting some recurring
style elements like heavy use of infodumping.

Lots of discussion of “Kuszib” by Hassan Abdulrazzak, which was at the very least extremely vivid. Some found it
enjoyable from a vegetarian/animal-rights perspective, as the use of
humans for food can be seen as commentary on our current commercial
carnivory, although obviously the main read here is on a "consuming" occupying force. Lots of
discussion of the “polymorphous perverse alien”, and compared it
somewhat to Tiptree's “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side” (which you can read on Lightspeed, btw) and Butler's Xenogenesis
trilogy.

We also talked about the cultural
chauvinism, the depth and kind of self-blind nature of exploitation
and resource-extraction, and made further comparisons to Planet of
the Apes.

We also spun off an interesting
digression about alien invasions that start in cities not recognized
as the “big major Western” types. Compared to Okorafor's Lagoon
for this, and also got us researching all the megacities of the world
that we rarely see portrayed.

No one knew quite what to make of the
"Day By Day Mosque" by Mortada Gzar and the snot extraction, though it did remind
me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes:

In a related story, Bill Watterson thinks he might have been
the first comic artist to put the word "snot" in print.

We were kind of intrigued by the idea
that there's not a lot of SF/F in the Arab literary world, and talked
a bit about tradition of subversive literature hidden within SF/F in
oppressive regimes—the Strugatsky brothers in Soviet Russia, Yoss
in Cuba, the rich history of Chinese SF that is starting to be made
available to English speakers.